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It was rare that Owen had the time or the inclination to work closely with his youngest son, however. Robert,
Richard’s serious-minded older brother, was closer to the reserved astronaut. When Richard and his father did work
together, the results were impressive. Late in Richard’s high school career, the two teamed up on a science fair project
they dubbed “Wave Propagation with Computer Analysis.”
Owen had taught and studied electromagnetic theory and ionospheric physics, and he showed his son a little about how light and radio waves moved though air, water, and other substances.
Richard, by that time, knew enough programming to create a fairly sophisticated simulation of radio waves’ motion on the
computer. Their combined efforts helped Richard win the U.S. National Science Fair, and he place fourth in an international
competition.
If the practical-minded Owen was forthcoming with his scientific knowledge, he was decidedly less so with his
own experiences, at least with his boys. Despite constant questions, Owen seemed less than enthusiastic about his trip into
space.
“My dad has never told me anything about being in space,” Richard said, leaning back in his office chair years later
and shrugging his shoulders slightly. “He once said it was kind of like scuba diving, but he never said anything with
any kind of emotion.”
The young Richard was much closer to his mother, an artist whose interests took her from pottery to silversmithing to
painting and well beyond to conceptual art. Her workshop upstairs in the Garriott home was always open to the kids,
and Richard in particular took frequent advantage of the open-door policy, working with his mother on clay sculptures
or little metal designs of his own. These were the little diversions, however—Helen thought big, and she wanted her sons
to be just as ambitious. She taught the boys to be totally committed to their projects, which the brothers did willingly.
“I like to think that I do big projects,” Richard said. “But I definitely acquired that drive from my mother.”
There was the time, for example, that Helen helped Richard and his brother Robert with their Boy Scout model building.
The trio decided to build a full-functioning airplane in the backyard, starting with two-by-fours, shaping the skeleton,
and then paneling the sides. They rigged the wing flaps with a pulley system so they could be opened and closed using a
handle in the cockpit, which also came with a working gearshift and a movable steering stick.
That was good, but it lacked a certain realism. They completely jerry-rigged the entire plane, using what little knowledge they had about planes and
their overactive imaginations, but it didn’t fly—a fairly important prerequisite for planes.
They wanted to build something that did more than just sit and look impressive. The inspiration for something better came
at the dinner table, where the boys would on rare occasions get a glimpse of life at NASA. One evening, Owen mentioned tests
astronauts had to endure before being allowed into the cockpit of an actual space ship. One of the toughest tests involved
a G-Force accelerator that simulated the crushing weight of gravity several times heavier than Earth they would feel as
their capsule catapulted out of the atmosphere.
At that point, a light bulb went on in Richard’s head, and “The Nauseator” was born. Four feet long and two feet wide,
the structure was built to spin whoever climbed into the little box 360 degrees, with the motion meant to be controlled by
motors. At the time, the boys believed they could turn this into a fully functioning game, in which the “astronaut” could
control the movements, although they never quite got the engines running their machine.
They built the controls, which consisted of two joysticks that would in theory guide both horizontal and vertical motion. The thousand-pound behemoth
took up much of their garage and was, in Richard’s words, “staggeringly dangerous.”
The engineering for the electronically controlled joysticks turned out to be far beyond the boys’ capabilities, but the
project wasn’t a total waste. Brute force still worked where technology had failed them. Their friends would climb in,
strap themselves down, and then with the help of three friends, the boys would spin the device in all directions, giving
the astronaut the dizzy feeling of a plane spiraling out of control. In the anarchistic realm of childhood, this was
something like the ultimate game.
There was no point, other than not to throw up, and by those standards there weren’t
many winners.
“We’d just spin the rings and you’d come out and recover feeling pretty good,” Richard’s older brother Robert said years
later, half-giggling at the memory. “Then you’d get this stomach thing going after about 10 minutes, just when you thought
you were going to be fine, and you’d just throw up all over the place. It was really staggering. Ten minutes.
Every time.”
These were the elements to which Richard brought home from Oklahoma his newfound desire to make computer games.
It proved to be a short step from the Nauseator to games that would sweep up dozens of people in his neighborhood,
and put him on the path to a starring role in computer game history. With summer nearly over, Richard spent his waning
free days building bike ramps and tree forts with his sister Linda and friend Keith Zabalaoui, who lived in a house behind
the Garriotts’ house.
But Richard couldn’t shake the feeling he had while playing D&D in camp.
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